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An Online Empire in the Making with 8 Sites Launched on BigCommerce
See first-hand the features that empower businesses like Online Stores to grow with BigCommerce.
35%
increase in revenue
33%
increase in conversion rate
41%
increase in transactions
It Started with a Flag
Anyone who has launched an online store knows that it’s no simple feat. Now, imagine launching eight stores in the span of five months during a global pandemic. It’s exactly what Online Stores did. But, getting things done and making things happen during times of testing is the fabric that Online Stores is cut from.
Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the nation experienced a shortage of American flags. At the time, Kevin Hickey was doing SEO work for a company that had the flag. However, customer demand kept crashing the company’s website. Finally, the company’s owner asked Kevin to pull the flag from the site.
Kevin did remove it, but he added finding a supply that would meet the country’s demand to his list of top priorities. He found suppliers, launched a website and began selling flags online.
Today, Kevin is the CEO of Online Stores, the parent company to a diverse family of stores that includes:
Lightup.com - State of the art LED lighting for homes, offices and warehouses
United-States-Flag.com - Largest specialist website with over 10,000 different flag products and flags representing every state and country
NorthlineExpress.com - Leading online supplier of fireplace products in the US
EnglishTeaStore.com - Gourmet tea and British food company
DiscountSafetyGear.com - High quality safety gear and equipment
ConstructionGear.com - High quality outdoor work boots and clothing
SafetyGirl.com - High quality work clothes, footwear and accessories for women
Collectively, the eight stores that make up Online Stores carry over 40,000 products and serve more than 400,000 customers a year.
Seizing the Opportunity
As told to BigCommerce by Crystal Rhome, Online Stores, Director of Technology.
After the launch of the first online store, others soon came along. For instance, Kevin is from England and he could never find a good cup of tea. So he began importing teas, candies, cookies and the like from England that he believed other British people living in America would enjoy as well.
We also started discountsafetygear.com, a store that sells personal protective equipment and safety equipment for workers such as safety glasses, face masks, face shields, etc. And as time went on we just acquired more websites. Some of them succeeded and some of them flopped, but today we’re eight online stores strong.
The interesting thing is that we launched our stores on BigCommerce right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. When it hit, discountsafetygear.com was actually considered an essential business because we were supplying personal protective equipment to individuals and companies. So our traffic really increased on that site to the point we had to go to two shifts just to get all the orders out.
BigCommerce handled it like a champ. We didn't have any problems with slow traffic or order volume, and received no complaints about technical issues on the website. Having a better website allowed all the customers flooding our site to place their orders and we didn't lose any sales because of that. I’m not so certain that would have been the case with our previous platform.
“Having a better website allowed all the customers flooding our site to place their orders and we didn't lose any sales because of that. I’m not so certain that would have been the case with our previous platform.”
Crystal Rhome Online Stores, Director of Technology
Dealt a Bad Hand
As told to BigCommerce by Crystal Rhome, Online Stores, Director of Technology.
We were on Magento 1 prior to BigCommerce. When the company announced it was ending support for the platform we knew it would cause us to lose our PCI compliance. This was the catalyst that prompted us to start searching for a new solution.
Honestly, we were glad to be looking for a new platform because we found Magento to be labor-intensive to maintain. It took weeks, if not months, to install an update and make sure it would work with all the customizations and extensions we had. We did a lot of testing and a lot of fixing to make things work with the release. Even after we went live we still dealt with problems.
We would experience site outages on a pretty regular basis. Any change made on one site would lock up the system and take the entire site down and even another site connected to the account.
Every time we would do a new customization, an integration or add new products to a website, it would slow down the page load time. Sometimes it would take 30 seconds for a page to load. We had to keep increasing the size of the server or remove products from stores to try and keep the system from bogging down.
As told to BigCommerce by John Mirenzi, Online Stores, Sr. Creative Developer.
It was like a house of cards. We’d get things running, but we had to be very, very careful about everything we did to make sure one little thing didn't go wrong that would just take everything down. But the writing was on the wall. We had outgrown the platform and were more than ready for a move.
Take it Out for a Test Drive
As told to BigCommerce by John Mirenzi, Online Stores Sr. Creative Developer.
I started researching ecommerce platforms back in 2017, because we knew at that point we needed to do something. I had just read an article comparing platforms at the enterprise level, and BigCommerce was in the article. So I just went on the site to take a look at it, like I did with a few others. I connected with Rachel in Sales, and we opened a discussion back in 2017 talking about the platform.
We did look at other platforms such as Magento 2, Shopify Plus, Kibo Commerce, Mozu, Workarea and Salesforce. But, it was BigCommerce that gave us the keys and said, “Here, take it for a drive and see if you like it.” We were able to put it through the paces and try to do what we needed to do to see if the platform would work for us.
We did that with a couple other platforms, but it just didn't work out so well. The support wasn't there, the help wasn't there that we needed to really evaluate it. But Andrew, a Sales Engineer, opened BigCommerce up for us like, “Here, you want an environment? Here, I'll spin one up for you.” We just were able to do what we needed to do to evaluate the platform.
“Having a better website is going to help us be successful in the marketplace. Being that it is more functional and quicker is going to make sure we get more traffic and a higher conversion rate.”
Crystal Rhome Online Stores, Director of Technology
An Exciting Future Ahead
As told to BigCommerce by Crystal Rhome, Online Stores, Director of Technology.
Having a better website is going to help us be successful in the marketplace. Being that it is more functional and quicker is going to make sure we get more traffic and a higher conversion rate.
Going forward, we'd love to see a very big increase in sales. We think we can really grow our business with the website being faster and easier for customers to use, so our goal year over year is usually a 10% growth. I would love to see it be beyond that 10% growth.
As told to BigCommerce by John Mirenzi, Online Stores, Sr. Creative Developer.
As we were developing and moving the sites to BigCommerce, it was pretty interesting to see how BigCommerce rolled out updates to the platform and new things being made available to us. One of the coolest things was seeing Page Builder released. It was like, “Oh, this is cool. Look at this new thing that's here.” So it's neat to see where things are going to go. BigCommerce was the right choice for us.
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